


Disembodied Voices

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pre-Slash, Sharing a Bed, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-13 03:05:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12974478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: Aboard a starship filled to the seams with a lost people, there's never a lot of room.But still the memories need to fit, somehow.





	Disembodied Voices

**Author's Note:**

> ...so, I asked the other day if anyone had any particular thorki cravings, given that I haven't written in weeks and I'm avoiding kylux until TLJ releases, and...well. A so-called "minific" went terribly wrong, ha. I'm blaming @schaudwen and @raven-brings-light.
> 
> <3

Oddly, _Loki_ is the first to suggest that, given the cramped quarters upon their repurposed starship, he and Thor ought to share quarters. In principle, it may not be so peculiar a concept; they are brothers, recent history notwithstanding, and have often enough bunked down together on various quests and adventures.

Perhaps, too, Loki simply understands that there is a natural hesitance amongst the other Asgardians to suggest their king share his private spaces. They may not have their grand and glorious home any longer, but they do still hold fast to long-held tradition and belief. Naturally, Loki knows how best to phrase it, words and voice smooth as silk while he cajoles them to new understanding. Thor may be king, but he is also still their golden son, still the bright-haired young lad they remember cavorting through the cobbled streets and glittering halls of old Asgard. Loki had ever been by his side, then; would it be so strange, then, that he remain there now?

Thor knows it is hardly that simple. But then, these days, he’s not particularly certain he would want it to be. Despite what people might otherwise believe, he’s not naïve about his brother’s nature. Rather, he is more accustomed to it; charmed, even, at times. But whether it provides amusement or irritation, its source is the important aspect – and he cannot deny the pleasure of having his brother right where he can see him.

Still, they do not see each other as often as he might prefer. Even in the cramped confines of the ship, they often feel to pass each other as overladen ships in the night. In that respect, the shared quarters perhaps matter less than one might think, considering they rarely seem to be inside them at the same time.

But he knows they share the space. And when he comes to it late one night, bone-weary and aching after a day of brutal repairs, he doesn’t hold back the curses to see what awaits him there. Still, he could just let it go; it has been, after all, a painfully long day.

But he also knows exactly where his brother is. And he finds himself there in short order, looming behind where Loki is debating agricultural niceties with a very suddenly silent master gardener.

“Loki.”

Even as said gardener begins to back discreetly away from the thunderous expression of her liege lord, Loki doesn’t look away, only rolling his eyes. “Can this not wait, brother mine?”

“ _Loki_.”

Now he huffs a breath, dismisses the poor woman with barely the flick of one gauntleted wrist. When he looks back, his arms fold over the smooth padded leather of his chest, eyebrow rising high. There’s something painfully familiar about the motion; it’s not until much later that Thor realises Frigga had often given both her sons that exact same expression of supreme exasperation.

“Well?” He even has gall enough to tap one foot. “What is it?”

Simple as the issue is, for a moment Thor can’t even speak. Then the words pour from him in a roar. “Everything in my room is _green_! Absolutely _everything!_ ” Then, even as Loki’s eyebrow inches higher still, he scowls, amends himself, “… _our_ room. I mean.”

The resultant smile has an angelic hue, though the victory in Loki’s eyes is anything but heavenly. “Well, there’s your answer.” The insouciance is feigned, hand smoothly curving so Loki might examine his shining nails. “It’s mine as much as it is yours.”

“So why does it look like you’re the only one who lives there?”

All amusement flees, then, Loki’s expression turned oddly shuttered: storm-windows closed tight against rising tempest. “Because you only use it to sleep.” Before Thor can protest, his voice becomes haughty, lecturing. “I use it for meditation, for spellwork, for calm repose. It’s only rational that it should therefore be decorated more to my own tastes.”

That leaves Thor strangely stung, even as sense tells him Loki likely could _never_ call such a travesty of colour and hue legitimate decoration. “I could spend more time there!”

“Why?” Loki does not even mock him. “Your place is here. Amongst your people.”

That’s true enough – Thor has ever hated to be still, and even here he moves constantly about the ship, restless as the weather of deep winter. But then, Loki himself has not kept to his shadows, as had been his wont in days of old. Apparently he’d played the role of Odin Borrson well, and even with the ruse revealed his counsel is still sought after. Naturally, some of his suggestions have been of the type best not taken seriously, but somewhat to Thor’s dismay the Elders _did_ decide there is some merit to the suggestion Thor himself might provide an auxiliary power source.

It’s not that he has any issue with the thought of giving his power to his people in whatever way they require it. It’s possibly more that Loki was smirking in a way that suggested he thought a king acting as a battery or dynamo might just be the merriest thing he’s seen in some time. Likely it’s just a bonus that said king is also his elder brother.

But it hadn’t aided matters when Loki had slapped his back and declared, “I’m sure Thor will prove the mightiest of sustenance for the people of Asgard!” This had then been followed by the appearance of several meat-centric cooking tomes in their chambers. In retrospect, Thor thinks their mother was a goddess almost purely because she got them both through their joint childhood alive.

But that was then, and this is now. Thor knows that when he says, “You belong here as much as I do, Loki.”

The warning edge to the words is jolly, almost sing-sing. “Oh, do I really?”

“We’re not going to have this argument again, are we?”

And Loki blinks, just once, amusement fading without trace. “I do have work to be doing, so if you haven’t the time for it – then, no. We don’t have to have it again.”

Already he turns away. His name burns on Thor’s own lips, though he keeps it to himself. He’s said the wrong thing. But then he so often has, in the past. He supposes the difference is that now he knows better. He knows he ought just be glad there’s time enough to learn how not to say it in the first place.

“He gets kind of grumpy, eh?”

“What?” When he turns to find Korg standing nearby, he’s for a moment deeply puzzled. Then he realises that the bulky warrior had blended into the hydroponic garden a little too well for comfort. He’s still slight off balance when he adds, “Oh. Yes.”

“Is it ‘cause he’s from that weird ice place?” Korg purses what passes for lips, turns to consider the way Loki had just exited. “Maybe he’s just kind of blue, or something.”

The sideways look Thor gives him then doesn’t help. He suspects he’s never going to quite understand what moves through Korg’s mind. “…no, he’s just Loki.”

“’cause, you know, being a stone giant and all, I know something about that,” he goes on, blithe as always. “Like, we get that way sometimes, you know? Cycles, a bit moody, that kind of thing. Maybe it’s just giants, I don’t know. Things can get just a little….” He pauses, considers again. “…rocky?”

Thor barely smothers a cough. “He just needs to cool down.”

“Yeah, nah.” And yet he still seems cheerful enough, blunt features animated and oddly kind. “But I kind of understand it. Taken from his birthplace, just a little baby, made to grow up somewhere where he didn’t even get any of his own culture?” Mournful, now, he adds with a deep sigh, “That’s just colonialists for you, though.”

Though there’s a lot to unpick there, Thor frowns over just one particular thing. “Korg, has Loki actually been _talking_ to you about Jötunheimr?”

“Oh, yeah!” He brightens considerably. “It’s his new play, eh? _Bloody Thieving Colonialists_ , that’s the working title.” Pride radiates him from sun from the sky, already considerable chest puffing up like cumulonimbus. “And I’m the lighting guy!”

“I…well.” For a moment he thinks of slapping Korg on his back – but then recalls that the last time Korg had returned the gesture in kind, they’d ended up repairing the hull breach for half a day. “…happy lighting, then.”

“It’ll be the most mean as lighting you ever seen!” Almost as soon as the words are out, his eyes widen, expression almost bashful. “Well, maybe not _you_. With the lightning and everything, yeah? But I think I’ve got the appropriate qualifications for the high expectations the director is placing upon me.”

His smile this time is perfectly genuine. Though he still resists the urge for a companionly clap. “I’m sure you do.”

With the cool fresh scent of the arbour still upon his skin, Thor returns to his rooms. While they’re hardly the palatial quarters he had had back home, in a peculiar way he finds he does not miss them as much as he perhaps should. The memory of the city and its palace hurts, certainly. But already so much of it feels to have been something of a dream. He supposes that he lost the Asgard of his childhood long ago.

But he will not forget any of it: the distant ring of laughter, light and smooth as silk, or hearty and hale as the person who had voiced it. And then, but brief grin, half-hidden behind a beard and the curve of one armoured hand. Then there was the roll of bright eyes, the sting of a slap upon bare biceps. All lost, all gone – save for Sif, perhaps, but even Heimdall’s vision has not yet laid eyes upon her. Where she has ventured, no-one can be sure.

Thor aches for her, and not only for himself. Brunnhilde would surely find in Sif a worthy new companion, one as disinclined as other to settle for what she refers to as “your usual petty bullshit.” Both Thor and Sif had both dreamed of places amongst the Valkyrie as children; should Sif return, Brunnhilde would prove a most worthy sister-in-arms for her, too.

As for now, his brother remains nowhere in sight. It surprises him not that there has been no change to the décor, but he’s tired enough now not to care. He can make but brief ablutions in the small shower facilities, the water both limited and lukewarm. Wearing naught but his own skin, Thor crosses to the bed, just barely big enough for two people of average Asgardian size. He’s not entirely sure what makes him look, given his usual habit of just falling upon the mattress and letting sleep take him whatever way it might have him. But when he strips the covers back and finds a coiled cobra at the heart of his bed, Thor just rolls his eyes, and gives up.

The creature proves strangely warm, crushed where it now is beneath his weight. Squirming in its scales, the smooth fluid muscle clenches in spasm beneath him. But the head is securely pinned beneath one artfully flung arm. Thor even allows himself a curl of the lips as he closes his eye, lets himself linger upon the edge of sleep even as the creature becomes more frantic in its efforts to escape.

Then, finally, a voice at his side rings out.

“Thor!”

Even that isn’t enough to stir him. “I don’t care if it’s poisonous.”

“The term is _venomous_ , actually.”

The only reply Thor bothers with comes as a long, slow, and oddly melodious fart. Though not particularly fragrant, Loki’s disgusted snort is victory enough. “Get up. _Now_.”

“No.”

The warning note sounds almost like a promise. “You’ll die.”

He considers faking a yawn, and while doing so, does one for real. “Fairly certain I won’t.”

“Yes, you will.”

With an exaggerated sigh, Thor shifts somewhat, though it provides but the faintest relief to the creature pinned beneath him. But it allows him to move his other hand to the thing’s tail, where he closes forefinger and thumb in hard pinch. With the edge of lightning he adds to it just for spice, the resultant shriek is decidedly less than serpentine: and then it’s Loki beneath him, the doppelganger at the beside blinking out even as the original writhes anew.

“Get off me, you great oaf! I can’t breathe!”

“If you can talk, you can breathe.” Quite serene, Thor lays his head back down, finds the scent of the garden in thick black hair beneath his cheek. “You made this bed, Loki. So sleep in it.”

Though he subsides, Thor knows enough to figure it for something other than surrender. “Well,” Loki murmurs, low and light, “that’s not _all_ that beds are for.” A shift of energies moves beneath him, and suddenly the bulk beneath him turns lesser. It’s nothing to the shock of looking down into the familiarity of dark wide eyes. “Or should I just be glad you haven’t been dragging your conquests back here, perhaps?”

It has its intended effect; Thor draws back as if burned. But he does not retreat, only rocks to a seated position upon the bed, his single eye locked on this latest trick. In the silence Loki lets the image of Jane Foster fade, lips curled as he stretches long limbs with easy scorn. “…or are you still true to her beloved memory?”

“We broke up.” He says it short, brooking no argument, even as he can’t help himself from adding, “Mutually.”

“Of course.” The words come sugary sweet, too thick for even Loki’s quick tongue. “No-one _ever_ casts aside the Lord of Thunder.”

“ _God_.”

Loki grins wider yet. “I’m not the Grandmaster, Thor,” he says, almost coy. “No need to impress me.”

But there is. Not that he can say so. Still, the coolness of the recycled air upon his bared skin seems a strange thing now. He’d never noticed it before. Loki lies before him on their bed, fully dressed from gorget to boots, and Thor feels the chill even more.

Abrupt, he turns away, reaches for the coverlet. “Are you coming to bed, then?”

At least he sounds startled when he speaks from behind him. “What?”

“You said we should spend more time together.” Thor burrows into the bed, back to his brother now. “But I’m tired, and there’s only one bed.” And though he wants to keep up the pretence of ignoring him, Thor still glances over when he says, “It’s not like we haven’t shared one before.”

It’s most unusual, to see Loki struck so dumb. Yet he scarcely pauses a moment before pursing his lips, seemingly making a decision; it’s odd indeed to see the process so revealed. Then he’s moving to his feet, crossing the room. Disappointment takes Thor like a blade between the ribs, until he sees that Loki has moved only to the bath chamber.

Throwing away the covers, Thor lies on his back, the coverlet now barely covering his hips. There’s something strange, reclining like this, waiting for his brother like a bridegroom for his wife. When Loki strides out in but his robe, a swirl of black and green, that scarcely makes it better. Thor even startles as Loki climbs onto the bed and prowls closer still. But there he sits back on his heels, and Thor sees for the first time the object in his hand is a hairbrush.

“That’s mother’s.”

The sudden words twist his lips into something not quite a frown. “Yes. It was.” But it seems the taste of his own correction is sour in his mouth. “Do you want me to braid your hair or not?”

“What?” Boggling at his brother is hardly a new sensation, but this has a different sort of storm about it. “Loki, I don’t _have_ any hair to braid.”

“Don’t you?” Though Thor keeps his eyes on his brother alone, he can feel it now, brushing his shoulders as it once had: long and soft, familiar and warm. “That’s not how I see it.”

Reaching towards him doesn’t cause Loki to pull back. In fact, it’s almost too easy to take him by the wrist. And Loki smiles, brittle and sudden, knuckles white about the hand-carved handle of Frigga’s favourite brush.

“Don’t you want me to?”

“Loki.” He needs to say _it’s different, now_. But Thor knows there is no way to speak as much without Loki taking offense. That in itself is different enough.

“Give me the brush,” he says, instead, and now Loki scowls outright, even as he doesn’t attempt to break the hold.

“I’m the one who got it!”

“I’m not taking it from you,” Thor says, even as he reaches for it. “Let me.”

“Let you what?”

But Loki doesn’t resist the movement. With the brush in his hand, small and lovely compared to the weighted heft of Mjölnir, Thor turns Loki until he sits behind, legs bracketing his brother. This used to be easier, when they were smaller. Loki had fit…not better, exactly. He still fits now. But there had been something different, then.

As he begins to pull the brush through the glossy hair, he realises what is missing: their mother, beside him. Her strong fingers, long and deft, showing him the braidwork. Thor had long had the habit of yanking Loki’s hair whenever he’d squirmed – and he’d squirmed often enough. It had been Thor who had always sat patiently throughout the process entire, like an old hack of a horse enjoying a brushdown.

A hank of hair twists smoothly now about rough fingers. And he pulls. Hard

“Thor!”

Even as Loki twists to glare daggers upon him, Thor just raises both eyebrows, twists him back around to continue his work. “Wasn’t me.”

“Oh, who _was_ it, then?”

“I don’t know.” Loki’s high disgust makes him chuckle, and he doesn’t bother to mask it. “Maybe the boogeyman.”

“The boogey—oh, for Ymir’s sake.” He snorts out a breath, but he doesn’t move. “Just hurry up.”

“Why?” Thor keeps his strokes long and smooth, fanning out the hair over his brother’s slim shoulders. “Have you somewhere else to be?”

The words have all the consistency of fresh black ice. “We are moving towards a war, brother mine.”

“Perhaps we always were.”

He hadn’t meant to say that. But given Loki’s answering quiet, perhaps he’d needed to. The memory of the uncovered murals, high above the Allfather’s throne, burn him still. They’ve never spoken of it, really – not of Hela, not of Odin. He supposes they should. But there is yet more to come, in this time of upheaval and change. There never seems time enough to think on what has already come, when already so much is gone.

The silence seems better. His brother’s breathing turns slow and even, something he can feel beneath his working hands. Loki is alive, beneath his touch. He is real. He is _here_.

Only when it is done does Thor draw away. Sometime during the process his own hair had returned to its shorn state. It leaves him only the faintest of regrets; far better, perhaps, to have things as they truly are. And Loki is turning, utter distraction as he has ever been, and there’s something in the cock of his head. He’s but a half-silhouette in the low light, and Thor wonders if Loki will ever know how much he resembles their mother. Blood or no blood, he had been in every way Frigga’s son.

It’s Loki who moves first, one hand, fingertips hovering just beneath the eyepatch. “Does it hurt?” he asks, his own eyes fixed upon the fine leather; Thor spares him a snort.

“Like I’d tell you.”

“Fool.” But there’s no venom in it. Instead Thor pulls back the covers, lets Loki fussily rearrange them to his own liking, and then: they are in the dark, together. It’s something they have done before, and many a time.

It’s still something different entire. Not like the boys they were – instead as the men they are. The natural urge is to curl around his leaner form. But it’s not protective, nor even possessive. Thor thinks it more the sliding of a sheath over its forged and fitted sword. And behind that comes memory of his hammer, though he misses her less than he would have believed possible. With the flow of lightning through his veins, he knows the rage of her borrowed storm with every breath he draws. It leaves him to ponder if Loki, master seiðmaðr, has always felt this way. Though raised in a different skin than the one he was born to, Loki has never needed conduit for his elemental power. It has always been always and precisely his own.

Perhaps that had been Frigga’s most precious gift, in the end.

“Sometimes, I feel like I can hear her.” Loki’s own voice is disembodied in the darkness, floating as gently as fond memory. “Like a voice, in a distant room. That if I just moved quicker, I could…” The pause is a drawn breath; beneath it, saltwater. “…that she’d be there. Just around the next corner.” He stops, again, voice fading now. “…if I could only get there.”

Large hands, empty of weapon now, trace slow over the woven hair, black ink in the darkness. “You always run, Loki,” Thor whispers. “Why can’t you just stand still, even for a moment?”

And of course he lies still and stiff, now, even in his arms. “That’s how you get caught, idiot.”

“Aren’t you already?”

The silence holds too long. Thor waits. And then Loki turns to him, so close, their noses all but pressed together. The breath against his skin moves like the charge of stormwind. “Do you want to keep me prisoner here, brother?”

“Do I have to?”

A sigh, and no answer. But the charge between them, ozone-bitter and star-bright, possibly says more than even Loki ever might. They have been passing by a nebula for three standard days, now. They’d even watched it together, for just a little while between the endless tasks upon their small kingdom-ship. And there, before the viewport, Thor had for a moment watched his brother instead. The wild taste of chaos and change had reflected so bright in Loki’s pale eyes, as if it could never have been borne anywhere else.

“You can go whenever you want.”

He feels rather than sees Loki press his lips together. “As if you’d allow it.”

“As if you’d ever want to.”

Now comes a pause, upon some strange precipice Thor cannot see. Then, with a sigh, Loki turns his head again, leaving Thor curled still about his body entire. “I thought you wanted to sleep.”

“That’s what beds are for,” Thor says, agreeable and low. An answering huff returns to him, deep in the darkness. But Loki subsidises, warm bulk in his arms. But he does not move, and he does not go. The ship glides forward into the darkness, ever towards Earth: but for now, they are still.

“I don’t suppose you could see your way to changing the colour scheme of our rooms?”

“Oh, of course.” He shifts in the dark, and Thor can taste the richness of his brother’s seiðr upon the air. “My princess does love his pink, yes?”

He snorts, says nothing more. He’s always had a fondness for red, in all its shades and permutations. No doubt Loki will have some new surprise for him in the morning, but for now, they sleep. He knows all will change, again. Their lives are now in constant chaotic flux. But his brother lies in his arms, alive: Thor cannot help but be glad for it, even if he fears it, too. They are together, here and now, in the dark. And when the light returns, it will be the same. There is never one without the other.

Not even the universe itself could hope to change a truth as certain as all that.


End file.
